How to build a profitable podcast.
This post outlines how and why we started bCast. Tom and Neil met in 2019 and started building right away...
It all starts on a dark gloomy morning in London at the start of 2019...
And I am just getting to grips with a new role as the Head Of Marketing at a B2B SaaS business in London. I've spent six years marketing products online, I'm pretty confident I'm going to smash this role.
So I march into the business, hire a team and identify one customer persona that I am positive will be a goldmine.
Sales operations
These are the people responsible for making the sales team more efficient. The business sold sales software, and these people were going to buy it.
The challenge was that I had no idea about this persona's pains, frustrations and desires. So I do what any effective marketer does and reach out to a few of these people to see if they would be happy to give me some time so I can learn about them.
The response?
Crickets
This is a problem... how am I going to sell to these people if they won't let me understand them?
And then, one slow afternoon in the office whilst I'm beginning to loose faith in my marketing ability... I research the "sales operations" niche one last time.
Something hits me.
I can't find a good podcast about the role... this could be an opportunity.
Five days later, the head of sales and I are sat crowded round a microphone talking about sales ops. It goes ok, we get a couple of listeners and we embed the content onto our website.
Over the next three months, I interview twenty sales operations experts and...
And then something magical happens, one of the sales operations guests that joins the podcast, then moves through the sales process and purchases our software for all their sales reps. This single deal brings a 9-10x ROI on all time and resources spent on the podcast.
I realise that I may have found the holy grail of B2B marketing and leave that business to run this process for a number of other SaaS and service businesses.
So I'm now trying to run this process for multiple businesses using some well known podcast hosting software. But there are things that I need it to do that it just isn't built for.
These other podcast hosts are great, but they are not catering for my needs as a marketer. There has to be a better way.
So I do what any marketer would do when they need help with a project, they email their list.
I send an email to an email list of SaaS marketer's that I have been building over the past few months, in the P.S. I ask if anyone has experience building web applications and is also interested in podcast.
I get two replies.
One clearly isn't serious
And one... is Neil.
Now Neil is an OG in the game, he is an ex. school teacher turned developing wizard and ran his own "non-SaaS" email autoresponder. Yep that's right, software you download that can be used to send mass emails and he ran this business for 16 years before selling it on.
As soon as I speak with Neil, I can tell he's a marketer. We get on like a house on fire.
Within a couple of weeks we have signed some paperwork, got some design work done and the build begins.
Three months pass, I am spending a lot of time working out how to start and grow client podcasts and feed all of these insights into the bCast product roadmap. Neil is grinding away and within two months we transition the client podcasts onto bCast.
Development continues and we build three features that differentiate us from the rest of the podcast hosting market:
We allow you to insert and audio CTA to the start or end of any episode for a specific time period. Imagine you have a webinar next week that you are promoting, why not insert a call to action to this webinar in every previous episode for the next five days?
bCast provides an email address that podcast hosts can read out during their podcast, listeners can send a blank email to this address to get receive an ebook, sign up to a webinar or simply subscribe to future episodes. Leads are passed through bCast into your email autoresponder or CRM.
bCast users are able to integrate their affiliate links into their bCast player so that any traffic they do send back to bCast from their embeddable players or podcast website, will claim them a chunky 40% commission.
Remember, bCast exists to help marketers make a profit from their podcast, each of these features are perfectly aligned with this mission. Now of course there are many other suitable podcast hosts on the market, but none of them cater just for the marketer.
Once these features are built, bCast goes live in May 2020. The world of podcasting shifts on its axis. A shift towards the side of the marketer.
So what happens next?
Well Neil and I are not one hundred percent sure how the product will evolve over the next few years, but we are very sure that we will stay true to our routes.
We both live and breath B2B marketing, and have done for the extent of our professional careers. We are committed to building the best possible podcast host for marketers to increase the profitability of their podcasts.
Thanks for reading... if you're interested in joining us on our journey to make podcasts profitable, we invite you to sign up for 14 day free trial of bCast here.
